Retro Gaming Australia

The folks behind the lovely Retro Gamer magazine have just released another “Bookazine” compilation – their 7th to date.

Retro Gamer Bookazines are essentially best-ofs, featuring 228 pages of content selected from numerous recent issues. The latest volume includes Making of features on Computer Space, Tetris, Double Dragon, Final Fantasy VII, Maniac Mansion and Sonic the Hedgehog, Collectors Guides for the Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Game Gear, and other features like 100 Classic Gaming Moments and Inside the Atari 2600.

You can order Retro Gamer Bookazine #7 from Imagine Publishing for £9.99

Retro Gamer has reached its 100th issue milestone this month. It’s an amazing effort really – a magazine that targets a niche audience that has managed to outlast many bigger and bolder rags: a real testament to the magazine’s quality.

The 100th issue features some pretty awesome articles including Making Ofs for Grand Theft Auto and Sonic the Hedgehog, an interview with Rob Hubbard, and a feature with David Crane discussing all of the tricks he used to get the most out of the Atari 2600. You can buy the magazine from the Apple App Store for $5.49, although the physical magazine comes with a reprint of the very first issue – which used to sell for a lot of money on eBay (and now presumably won’t).

Retro Gamer launched in 2004 as a quarterly publication, but its frequency increased with each issue due to better than expected sales. The Live Publishing run of the magazine encompassed a cover CD with classic ads, retro remakes and authorised collections of games from a particular developer.

However, when Live Publishing went under in September 2005, Retro Gamer did too. The staff put together a CD called Retro Survival with the content that would have been featured in the 19th issue of the magazine.

Imagine Publishing came to the rescue, snapping up the rights to the magazine and relaunching it in December 2005, albeit without a cover disc – and the magazine has run continuously since under the guidance of editor Darran Jones.

If you’ve not been a reader of the magazine up to this point, you can pick up digital versions of the magazine either on DVD (there are three volumes, covering up to issue 80, at £19.99 each) through the Imagine Store, or through App Store for $5.49 an issue.

Everybody loves Retro Gamer, because it’s a stonking good read. Every year or so, the lads that run the magazine cherry pick the best articles from the last 12 issues and compile them in these volumes (which they call “bookazines” – nobody’s perfect) and sell them for a pittance.

Well, the fifth of these collections has just been released in the UK. For £9.99, you get 258 pages of the best content from the last 12 months of RG, including The Making of Strider, The History of Tomb Raider, articles on favourites such as Shenmue and Super Metroid along with in-depth interviews with the likes of Geoff Crammond (Grand Prix) and David Crane (Pitfall!).

If you live in Ol’ Blighty, you can pick it up from WH Smiths and Barnes & Noble. Everyone else should be able to order it online through Imagine Publishing.